"google" is Word of the Decade

The search engine giant scored another influence boost recently when the American Dialect Society declared “google” the word of the decade.

Yep, you read correctly. The winning word of the decade was “google” with a lowercase “g”. The ADS intentionally chose a generic form of the corporate name and defined it to mean “to search the Internet”. This therefore means that, according to the ADS, even when a searcher uses Bing or Yahoo then they are still “googling” so to speak.

After all, brand identity always wins in the end doesn’t it? The vast majority of us state that we are going to “hoover up” rather than “vacuum”, which is a nod in acknowledgement to the Hoover brand of vacuum cleaners.

And it seems that “google” is no different when it comes to carrying out a search online.

Twitter fans will also be pleased with the ADS' choices, as the term “tweet” was judged to be 2009’s word of the year.